The British GENES blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

Of these, note that Ancestry, like FindmyPast, has now completely reindexed its First World War army service records, sourced from WO363 and WO364, and listed here as both service and pension records (they are all service records, some were used for pension applications). With Ancestry, included in the indexed entries are all family members named in the records - not just the soldier himself. So now you can search for children, wives and more. Peter Calver has worked through an example of this on his latest Lost Cousins newsletter, accessible at www.lostcousins.com/newsletters/latejun14news.htm.

I've had a look myself, and from what I can see it looks like additional names have only been indexed if the relationship has been specifically given. I'm also unclear as to how much of the content has been reindexed - for example, I have the service record of my 2 x gt grandfather's brother, John Graham, born in 1887 Belfast, though indexed on Ancestry as 1888 in the WW1 Service Records collection. The fact that it is the right John Graham is confirmed by a letter included with the papers from my three times gt grandfather Edwin - but Edwin's name has not been picked up by Ancestry from this letter as his father. So Ancestry may have only looked at certain documents in doing so. Nevertheless, a better index is always appreciated.

3 comments:

I get your post via email and it arrives each morning while I am sleeping (I am in Ottawa - saw all your presentations at BIFHSGO). Before I get out of bed, I check my emails on my phone and always enjoy your news. This morning's was perfect for a Sunday. Looks like you had a very interesting trip and it makes me quite jealous. Thank you!